A New Dawn is Breaking

Hello! Welcome to 'The Japadventure: My Quest to Learn Japanese'. In case you haven't read the front page: In English in 10th grade we were given an assignment of a 'quest' . What is a quest? Well, every student was given a chance to learn whatever they wanted for an entire year; and after some thought I decided that I was going to learn Japanese for my quest.

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Before I begin the reason for the existence of this blog... I doubt many people will understand my title for this blog post, so I thought it should be explained a tiny bit. There are many names for Japan, one of them being 'Nippon' or 'Nihon' which translates literally to 'sun origin' but most people just say 'land of the rising sun'. Also, when people usually say things like 'new dawn' it usually refers to a new beginning, or something along those lines. However, enough of patting myself on the back, the title is not the entirety of the blog.

(The red dot on the Japan Flag symbolizes the sun)

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Why Japanese?

I had multiple reasons for choosing Japanese. The main reason being that I watch a lot of shows/movies that use the language and I thought it would be fun and interesting to try to understand some basic words and phrases that are used constantly. My other reason I chose to learn this language was because English is my native language and in school I am learning Spanish. Both of them are languages in the Americas and I want to, later on in life, travel to many different countries, so I wanted to learn a language that was in the East and it had to be one that I know I would not give up on, Japanese was a perfect candidate for that.

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Can this even help you in the real world?

Other than me being feeling good about myself there are some practical benefits. If I decide to continue with this language for however many years in the future then eventually I would be able to talk with speakers that only can speak this specific language, more job opportunities would be open for me, even in daily life this can help as a conversation starter or reading signs I would not be able to otherwise. So yes, it can help me in the real world in many ways.

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As hard as 一, 二, 三! (1, 2, 3)

Over the course of learning this language I am not expecting this to be a cakewalk, in fact, I expect it to be the exact opposite because firstly, Japanese uses its own set of letters. Unlike English and Spanish where they use Latin-based letters, Japan on the other hand is a 'language isolate' which means they have no correlation with any other language, and thus, I cannot relate it to anything I know. I also expect difficulties in the most basic thing a language has: the alphabet. This very basic thing will most likely be my biggest hurdle because Japanese contains not one, but three plus one different alphabets (the last one is mainly to help English speakers pronounce the letters), each with their own ways to write the letters and are used in different situations.

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Some final notes for this post.

I do not know how you managed to stumble across this blog; but hopefully I have managed to intrigue you somewhat and you will stay to read at least some of my journey on this Japanventure.